ARIMAG
At this very moment, our city is in the thick of all the frantic bidding to be selected as the site for the new Dinosaurland theme park. The stakes are sky high! Having Dinosaurland in our city will mean jobs, jobs, and more jobs!
Tourists will come to our city from all over the world if Dinosaurland is here, because everybody loves witnessing real, live, genetically engineered dinosaurs. Dinosaurland is the perfect place for picnics, children’s birthday parties, and corporate events.
So our city leaders are pulling out all the stops to convince the fine folks at Dinosaurland that we are indeed the most worthy suitors. Whereas other cities are offering to lease all the land Dinosaurland needs for $1, our city leaders are offering to lease the entire city to Dinosaurland for 100 years for a dime. And then our city leaders will rent whatever remaining parts of the city Dinosaurland isn’t using back from Dinosaurland, for the rest of us to live on.
The most expensive cost of running a theme park that is a prehistoric jungle with live dinosaurs is, of course, liability insurance. That’s why our city’s bid absolves Dinosaurland of all legal responsibility should any park visitors be eaten by a dinosaur or suffer any other misfortune, such and being at ground zero when a pterodactyl flies overhead and takes a dump. (This, by the way, is why all Dinosaurland visitors are required to wear hard hats.)
Our city’s bid absolves Dinosaurland of all legal responsibility should any park visitors be eaten by a dinosaur or suffer any other misfortune.
Which brings us back to that bonanza of wonderful jobs! These won’t all be minimum wage service jobs. Hundreds of skilled workers will be needed, for example, to clean up dinosaur waste. Have you ever seen brontosaurus droppings? Believe me, there is no pooper scooper in the universe that will even begin to suffice for executing that task. No, adequately removing dinosaur waste will require a fleet of bulldozers and dump trucks.
And what about removing dead dinosaurs? A crane must be brought in to hoist the dinosaur corpse onto the back of a flatbed truck, which will then take it to the dinosaur crematorium. And cremating dinosaurs will require workers with another set of special skills.
Naturally, there are naysayers and negative Nellies who fight against Dinosaurland coming to our city. Some of them say the tax breaks and other financial incentives being used to lure Dinosaurland are corporate welfare. Well, there’s only one thing I have to say in response: Jobs!
Environmentalists warn that the proprietors of Dinosaurland will dump all the dinosaur poop in our rivers and waterways. But, you know what? Jobs! Advocates for public safety have expressed concern that the dinosaurs could escape from the park and rampage throughout the city, devouring us all. But think about all those juicy jobs!
If we are the proud home of Dinosaurland, our city will be internationally revered as the model for urban economic development in the twenty-first century. Sure, it will also be the stomping ground for monstrous carnivores who might just kill us all. But that's a small price to pay for so many new jobs.
Mike Ervin, a writer and disability rights activist in Chicago, writes the blog Smart Ass Cripple at smartasscripple.blogspot.com.